


until your godless name rots into my bone marrow

by cyanica



Series: smithereens [post order 66 au verse] [1]
Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Prequel Trilogy, Star Wars: The Clone Wars (2008) - All Media Types
Genre: Ahsoka Tano Needs a Hug, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Anakin Skywalker Doesn't Turn to the Dark Side, Anakin Skywalker Needs a Hug, Angst, Blood, Broken Bones, CT-7567 | Rex Needs a Hug, Episode: s07e11 Shattered (Star Wars: The Clone Wars), Gen, Horror, Human Disaster Anakin Skywalker, Hurt Anakin Skywalker, Hurt No Comfort, Injury, Major Character Injury, Mental Breakdown, Mental Instability, Mild Gore, Order 66 (Star Wars), Protective Ahsoka Tano, Psychological Trauma, Seizures, Whump
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-03
Updated: 2020-07-03
Packaged: 2021-03-05 05:08:29
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,495
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25048936
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cyanica/pseuds/cyanica
Summary: Their blood transfused like one, lifeforce of two beings becoming one flesh, and Rex had the vague, haunting image of children making blood oaths amongst the destruction of the universe.Or Palpatine gives the order, Anakin breaks Rex’s hand, and Rex bleeds in penance. Ahsoka is there to piece together the fragments that can’t be fixed anymore.
Relationships: Anakin Skywalker & Ahsoka Tano, CT-7567 | Rex & Ahsoka Tano, CT-7567 | Rex & Anakin Skywalker
Series: smithereens [post order 66 au verse] [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1814155
Comments: 12
Kudos: 79





	until your godless name rots into my bone marrow

**Author's Note:**

> this started out as a rex&anakin fic i found on my phone from 2018. i had completely forgotten about it, but was coincidentally already thinking about a rex/anakin post order 66 au. that story has kinda developed into this verse, with it focusing on all the characters instead of just rex, but thanks past me for writing about 700 words! but i will finish what u started >:) 
> 
> p.s soz old me, but ive replaced basically everything you’ve written.
> 
> p.p.s in this au verse, rex takes his chip out on his own sometime after fives’ death, and anakin went to fight in the siege of mandalore (with ahsoka), so therefore order 66 does happen, but anakin does not fall (to the darkside, at least).
> 
> title from 'pointless verses, nonsense curses' - ssafehavens.

Bruised black and blue fingers – ones that looked more like a watercoloured canvas than mortal, living flesh, or more frostbitten and dead than human – wrapped around Rex’s wrist in the way one would as if trying to clasp onto gravity with what reality they still possessed. 

The chaos erupting outside the Venator’s metal framework and the threat of being hunted down by _brothers,_ was insignificant compared to the agony electrifying every nerve inside the Jedi’s body. 

Rex could see it in unapologetic scrutiny as he watched in horrified paralysis down upon the General's form. The air was sulfuric and acidic, as if electricity burned through the oxygen around them until they asphyxiated on intangible lightning. Rex vaguely wondered, from some long-deserted part of his mind, if _this_ is what the Force was: amplifying a screaming warning of death upon its own beings that ceased to exist from the essence of the universe. 

He was no Jedi, not by a long shot, but he had developed the knowledge to understand them at least – knowledge forged by years of serving beside them, watching them, watching _Skywalker_. It truly was this extraordinary, supernatural _force_ that bent to their whims, flowed through their veins like blood, and morphed into a metaphysical essence of life that had the hairs standing up on ordinary men’s necks if they were to ever witness the otherworldly, magnificent sight.

– And yet, Skywalker had always been something different.

He _was_ that extraterrestrial wavelength of pure, embodied _power_. He radiated a blinding sense of light that not only bound all these broken pieces of the universe together like a fragmented mosaic, but became – _consumed_ – them like the seduction of a merciful God upon his universe. 

And _stars_ , that terrified him. 

– Because General Skywalker had been the conduit for it all. Every dissipating lifeforce from the galaxy was screaming, _burning_ within Skywalker’s mind as if supernovas were falling like dying stars from the grace of space into an expanse of nothingness; as if their thousands of deaths at the hands of his brothers were simultaneously being pulled into a focal point onto his Jedi’s being, and Skywalker could taste ashen firefight on his tongue, feel blazing heat spread like wildfire throughout his veins, so much so, that the overwhelming sensation of rogue, genocidic polarisation was causing the neurons in his brain to collapse, muscles to rot alarmingly, and his body to just completely and irreversibly _die_ alongside those who had already perished into smithereens before him. 

Ash and the putrid smell of acidic sulfur was smothering the air. Rex, despite being a mere man untuned to the alien capabilities of his Jedi commanders, could feel it settling amongst his airways with every hypoventilative breath. It rotted through to his lungs, demanding agony and torture be felt in its wake. Skywalker could feel it too, heavy in the deranged air like aflamed pollution. He was choking on it – that rotting smell of burning flesh becoming engulfed by flame as human skin turned a blackened, festering wound, until no flesh remained at all, and had become completely consumed by intangible magma. 

_Get up._

Skywalker’s nails had embedded themselves into the clone’s skin, alighting the whole arm in newfound pain. Red warmth began to seep from the indentations upon Rex’s abused flesh. 

The Jedi was crushing his bones into shards. 

The mechno hand was pushing the fragments of Skywalker’s skull together, as if preventing his whole mind from coming undone the way the universe had before it; and yet the mortal, human hand made of flesh and blood and bone was disintegrating Rex’s arm like paper.

It was retribution, in some sickening, nauseating way that submerged Rex in frostbitten, deadened guilt. Somehow, he would stand forever, unmoving, unfazed, and silently for the rest of eternity and bleed for the lives his brothers had taken; purge his poisonous, tainted remorse that mimicked the blood his kind had shed and released upon the galaxy. 

But they couldn’t stay here. The ship was coming undone, whether by the chaos of colorful explosions and electrical surges that Maul had reigned down upon them, or by the will of the Force that ached agony throughout the atmosphere emanating from its Chosen One, they were going to die here. He needed Skywalker to –

_Get up._

The bones of his carpels fused together and broke upon impact as if somehow destined in some nauseating, horrifying way – and Skywalker hadn’t stopped screaming. He was the flame and the burning and the suffocating taste of ash and sulfur in the air. 

_The end of all things,_ warned the galaxy around the soldier: supernovas were destined to collapse into dust, stars were to be engulfed into nothingness by the will of black holes, and the very human, war-scarred bones of Rex’s wrist were foretold to shatter at the seams.

_This_ , destruction of peace and genocidic violence that burned in the wake of retribution, was what he was made for, and yet, Skywalker was who he bled for.

If Rex could just get him to –

“Get up.” He said, strangled for breath. His throat constricted the words like a serpent spiraling around his neck, contracting an intangible rope into the nauseatingly vivid image of a noose. They had reached the end of infinity, the universe had been hanged from the gallows of which they’d constructed and they were the ones left to stand in the remains.

Rex barked his order a second time, thrice – but Skywalker had curled in on himself like some insignificant child afraid of the dark, unmoving, and he bled from the shredded vocal cords and disintegrating brain matter that remained of his broken body. The blood pooled from his mouth and nose in a sadistic, mesmerizing way – horrific, but unable to look away, to unsee – and spilled across his feverish flesh until it met with Rex’s mangled, deformed wrist. 

Their blood transfused like one, lifeforce of two beings becoming one flesh, and Rex had the vague, haunting image of children making blood oaths amongst the destruction of the universe, despite how familiarly distant it was in his mind. Twisting, enslaving blood oaths that bound them to each other for the rest of infinity.

“Rex, it’s Anakin.” 

Pure static cut through the air in the way an explosion would. That fierce, sisterly voice pierced the air and struck them both as if it were a bullet. In the back of this mind, he recognized the sound of burning debris cascading onto the bridge like embers from a rain of fire, and the agonizingly familiar – _traitorous_ – orders erupted from unsilenceable commlinks.

_– Good soldiers follow orders –_

_– Kill the Jedi –_

_– Marked for termination –_

_– Anakin Skywalker and Ahsoka Tano –_

_Her_ voice was among those of his own, his brothers, and the animalistic, anguished throat-ripping screams rupturing from the Jedi upon the bridge’s floor. And yet – he couldn’t think to press the commlink to his mouth, didn’t recognise the terrified, unbelievably _young_ voice emanating from the speakers amongst this impossible war zone of friendly fire.

Ash clouded his mind until his mind was _nothing_. Skywalker had mutilated the entire bridge into smithereens. Sparks flew from control panels and burst as they collided with leaked fuel scouring rainbow hues across the metallic ground; scarlet glow, the shade of Skywalker’s broken veins and ruptured vessels, rose from the chaos around them and became alight, fire licking at the edges of the open room, threatening to devour. An invisible, intangible _force_ flooded the air in an inescapable way, destroying what had yet to be demolished by clones, and ripped through it all like the sky separating the growing, scorching sun from the horizon. It passed through the air and inside Rex like he was _made_ of it, filling his entire being with flame and volcanic magma that desolated his flesh and organs to the core. The smell of burning skin and hair was so rich and suffocating in the void of space, that he was certain they would all be reduced to ashes – the Jedi, the clones, the Republic, the Separatists, _every being that had ever existed and beyond._

The phantom, supernatural force with the life of a supernova seized control of his throat, among every object in the room and _crushed_ , constricting its prey as if it were made of glass. It shattered upon the hold of its unmerciful wielder and broke just as the remains of Rex’s sanity had. 

_Kill the Jedi. Traitors. Marked for termination._

“I feel something terrible has happened.” 

– And yet.

The world enslaving them all solidified the moment Skywalker's human, fleshy hand pulsed open from Rex’s wrist, along with the almighty invisible conduit that had released his throat, and left him choking on saliva and blood, lungs assaulted by newfound oxygen. The things that had been unnaturally suspended in midair by way of the phantom Force had collided to the ground, tearing up the metal framework and destroying the ship in a different way than it hadn’t been before. 

The ash was gone. 

He looked down to his mutilated, scorched, and fragmented limb – the entirety of the wrist mottled over in nauseating shades of violet and cyanic watercolors. The violent painting of ruptured flesh was met with crimson red bleeding from broken bone remnants that had burst through the violated skin, and in some unreasonably reasonable moment of mania and duty – Rex began to carry out the order he was destined to carry out. 

The Jedi slumped to his feet like discarded waste. Anakin Skywalker had brought upon the destruction of the Venator’s bridge, had poisoned the atmosphere in sulfuric, volcanic acid, had maimed _– skinned –_ Rex’s karking limb like it had been nothing but ribbon and good soldiers follow orders good soldiers follow orders good soldiers follow orders –

His undamaged, left hand gravitated towards the blaster by this side. His body moved on its own accord, familiar yet uncontrollable. He held the gun to Skywalkers shaking, convulsing head with unsteady but ready fingers, the index already wrapped around the trigger, content with squeezing –

Skywalker’s eyes didn’t look like eyes anymore. There was something animalistically inhuman in the way he shook, breathed. The screaming had seized the moment the ash lifted and the objects had smashed from midair like stars that had collided with ephemeral planets – and yet this _thing_ that was slumped before Rex was more unrecognizable than the uncontrollable _monster_ he had seemed like before. It carved daggers into Rex’s heart more than the ashen asphyxiation had, more than the bones colliding into one and then hundreds had. 

Azure, glassy, insanely inhuman irises rolled back inside Skywalker’s head, and the man came crashing down further into an unconscious slump towards the ground, just as every object had before him. Something had _snapped_ inside his feeble body like it had been a broken marionette on strings that had just been cut. 

As the rest of the Jedi’s body hit the durasteel, the ground suddenly erupted, cracked and broke damaging, fractured lines into an almost perfect circle around Skywalker’s frame from an unseen, phantom energy that perhaps screamed in protest at the sight. 

Red leaked from his head, fusing with the rainbow scorched marks of burned gasoline, framing his head in some nauseating replication of a halo. In all his tainted, havocking, angelic glory, a convulsing, seizing Anakin Skywalker loomed before Rex like a shadow that bled darkness as if it were a disease, infecting his own impurity with newfound devastation. The crimson glowed from underneath his head and onto the steel with a mocking vermillion twilight that rotted his body down to the core, morphing the Jedi into something wickedly oxymoronic. He was an unconscious, seizing, convulsing man that was dead to the universe – and yet a twisted metaphor for an unknown, darker entity that bled from within.

“Kid,” Rex heard himself say, with a voice that wasn’t his own. It sounded distant, devoid, untethered to reality in what was probably himself morphing into something unrecognizably inhuman just as all his brothers and now Skywalker had. 

“Rex?! I felt something so–... Where are you? Where’s Anakin? I have a shuttle –“ 

The commlink had somehow replaced the blaster in his left hand, though he never remembered dropping the gun, nor picking the commlink up and contacting Ahsoka. 

“The bridge.” He felt his mouth moving, but it acted on its own accord, as if he no longer had control over what he did or what he said. He was no longer convinced that the chip embedded into all their brains controlled how they acted, but instead that they were destined to be controllable, mindless and droid-like from the beginning – like a fatal flaw that hadn’t come with being a genetically modified clone amongst millions of others, but instead a good soldier that followed out his orders.

“I’m coming to get you boys. Hold on.” 

  
“Ahsoka,” Rex said, the sound of his voice and her name on his tongue felt foreign, intimate in a way that was undeserved. It was wrong to be granted that simple mercy of forgiving familiarity, that _innocence_ , in a world such as this one, where everyone had become shadows of who they were and did terrible, terrible things. “It’s bad.”

* * *

The room imploded with the nauseating smell of burning gasoline, sulfuric acid and the pungent irony stench of something distinctly human. 

Anakin lay on the ground by Rex’s side, and she thought she had gotten used to the sight of him, broken and undead on the floor throughout the ruins of the war with his own copper blood painting the universe like a canvas, but Ahsoka realized numbly, she hadn’t. The almost inaudible snapping of fragmented bone, the explosion of watercolour bruises that erupted in rainbow hues of sickly yellow, azure and lilacs across pale flesh, and that unnerved, pained choking sound escaping Anakin’s lips as he seized on the floor like a marionette without strings, gasping and convulsing like the oxygen in the atmosphere had dissipated; like it had burned from his lungs in some sort of sick retribution, a purge of purification that deemed Anakin Skywalker was unworthy of air – and he was condemned to be strangulated, twisted unholily by the puppeteer strings that had once set him free.

Rex knelt beside him, a beautiful contraction towards his family that had reigned genocidic polarisation on them all – yet nonetheless victims towards a scheme greater than they’d ever know. 

The copper, pungent, human smell erupted in assaulting waves as Ahsoka crept forward. The managed, unhuman arm of the clone’s wrist looked beyond recognition and tainted her being in the way blood did. Anakin’s was stained the same vibrant colour, but the life force was not his own.

“Rex! You’re hand–“

“I know. It’s fine.” Rex brushed aside, and lied in the way one was conditioned to by their own fatal design, but the damage had been done. Ahsoka saw through the facade like glass. The wound bled as if in penance, atonement, to make up for the chaos his brothers had condemned the world into. Ahsoka wanted to tell him the universe simply didn’t work that way no matter how she wished it so, but Rex knew.

He wouldn’t feel it the way she could, but it was as if the atmosphere had become electric. Sparks flew between the wavelengths of her synapses and burst as they collided with the broken pieces of Anakin’s shattered mind. The threatening, uncontrollable invisible force whispered around miscellaneous objects, readying to imploding them until they collapsed in on themselves. Fiery scarlet glow, burned from the intangible, unseen chaos of Anakin’s electrical storm and became alight, fire licking at the edges of the room, threatening to devour the illusion of serenity that they had previously clutched onto like life itself. Abstract energy flooded the oxygen in an inescapable way, filling the room with what Anakin Skywalker’s being was made of both presently and distantly, physically and mentally, until they all became what he was –

– _broken_.

“What happened?” She spoke the words as if she didn’t know the answer, lied to herself in a way one couldn’t, no matter how much she tried to convince herself otherwise.

“I don’t know. He’s seizing–”

Anakin choked out laboured, uncontrolled breaths that seemed to amplify against the walls of the Ventor’s bridge and morph the lie of ephemeral serenity into that of a broken, twisted hurricane. Ahsoka caught the screaming whispers throughout the supernatural, metaphysical essence of their connective Force-bond, and the absence of oxygen filling her lungs made her head dizzy. The world swam violently in front of her through a beautifully nauseating concoction of oxygen asphyxiation and a headache that burned like acid down her spine and into her bone marrow – something dark and evil, poisoning her. 

Desperately, she reached out for Rex who grounded her to reality like a lifeline, an anchor, keeping her from getting lost and drowned in Anakin’s storm. 

“Okay, okay. Get him on his side.” She ordered, numbly and clinically. It was alarming how many times she’d said familiar words throughout the course of her apprenticeship. 

_Check for concussion._

_Can you stop the bleeding?_

_Will he make it?_

She’d assumed it was the price of the war, at first, and that price would always have to be paid for with the blood of those who fought against it, but now it was different. Anakin Skywalker was different. He was more _connected_ than anyone knew, more intertwined to the cosmic wavelengths of unifying life, more destined to dive off the edge into eternal darkness – and it had been her job to pick up his pieces, until she couldn’t.

“Rex, what _happened_ ?” The words rolled off her tongue and melted within the acidic sulfuric fire in the atmosphere like butter, and though she’d asked the question twice now, she knew the answer like she knew her own name. That burning, blazing star in the back of her mind was falling from the sky in which she envisioned was the wavelength of the Force. The sense of _Anakin_ was dissipating into smithereens, while the galaxy fell all the same, like a dying supernova. It felt dark and _wrong_ , like a living dead man – and somewhere beyond, the universe was screaming. 

She saw shadows.

Ahsoka felt cold, dead starry frequencies throughout the base of her skull in the part of her brain that usually burned an infinite, familiar, vibrant ember of flame and light – the part of her mind that echoed with pure, addictive disallowed attachment to those whom she cared for. And there, lying in the deadened wake of her hold of the Force was Anakin, who had all but consumed her mind with his once youthful, blinding energy turned to ash. His presence in Ahsoka’s Force-sensitive mind had always astonished her, grown more powerful as the years had passed by, but, _Gods_ , it was suffocating her in the present moments. It was unfathomable to Ahsoka as to how her brother had fallen out of the place within her heart, in a way that felt like he was never _meant_ to be there to begin with – some way, somehow, always destined to fall. 

She froze over, craved and demanded that connection like a blinding, radiant sun across the Force, but it was no more. And in response, seeping fiery darkness engulfed the air as if Anakin were made of pure nothingness. 

“He just–... The order came through, and he collapsed.” Rex looked as pale as Anakin, face bloodless and mimicking the colour of the ash that she was choking on as it burned through her throat. She didn’t have to ask, but she knew he felt it too. It was frightening to see Rex like this – afraid, guilt-ridden, ashamed –, like it went against everything she thought she knew. But, hey, just about everything wasn’t what she’d thought it’d been, so Ahsoka shouldn’t be that surprise, even though it hurt all the same. 

“He was screaming, and I couldn’t–” Rex was telling her, and she wasn’t sure what he was supposed to say next. _Couldn’t stop my brothers? Couldn’t save the General? Couldn’t break my fucking arm free?_

“It’s alright.” It wasn’t, but there came a time to be truthful, and a time to wear a facade – familiar, repetitive, like many of them wore. Only hers was not as faultless as the galaxy – as Ahsoka herself – seemed to believe. Woven beyond the exterior of the carefully concealing, fabricated masquerade lay fault lines, cracked and fragmented in the way that the earthy ground became underneath the unrelating cascade of explosions and firefight of war, revealing volcanic, acidic streams of sulfuric ash and magma rivers: the planet’s unforgiven molten core. Only Ahsoka’s mask didn’t reveal fiery ravines and magma waterfalls like Anakin’s did, but instead the much more damning, more humanely essence of void-like blackholes of absolute terror and fear of the man she called brother, of Anakin Skywalker that burned just as darkly – forbiddenly – in its place. 

“Help me get him to the shuttle.”

**Author's Note:**

> this verse will have 4-5 stories with other povs like ahsoka (more than what is here), padme, obi-wan, maybe anakin’s in this lil au. idk the description of the series explains it all. its gonna be quiet depressing like this tho lmaoo...


End file.
